LANDLORD AND TENANT
In this branch of the law it cannot honestly be said that the legal position of the poor is very different from the legal position of the rich. Given private ownership of land and the right of a landlord to distrain for rent in arrear, and seize and sell his tenant’s goods to pay himself, it does not seem that the law or the way in which it is administered is better or worse for rich or poor. The law of distress is, as its name implies, a harsh and cruel remedy and the shadow of it hangs nearer and darker over the cottage porch than over the doors of the eligible mansion, but it is there in both places. To a weekly wage owner paying an exhausting rent out of a pitiful wage, the ever present right of his landlord to distrain, whilst it nerves him to make every effort to keep a clean rent book, must be one of the sad and depressing elements of daily life that the middleclasses do not experience so directly. It is pleasant to record—what is in fact my experience—that whatever may have been true of the cruelty of landlords in other times and places the landlords of to-day owning cottage property are not a harsh race. They themselves, especially the poorer ones, have their own troubles. The rates have to be paid, the by-laws to be observed, the notices of the sanitary inspector to be obeyed, and perhaps the fact that they themselves have to ask for time to pay and to sue for leniency from corporations and other officials leads them to be tender with their own underlings. Certain it is that in the putting in force of the right to evict a tenant the landlord is very long-suffering. This last step is not usually taken until the rent is many weeks, or often months, in arrear. Even when an eviction order is granted, I have known many cases where a landlord renews the tenancy and collects the arrears at small instalments.
Eviction orders are very often asked for not in the landlord’s own interest but in the community’s. The necessity to do the sanitary requirements of public bodies is a constant source of eviction. The tenant having no neighbouring house to go to clings to the undesirable shelter he has got until the forces of the law turn him out in the interests of hygiene. Another curious cause of eviction is a woman’s tongue. A lady with what is technically known as “a tongue” will set all her neighbours by the ears; houses on each side of her domicile rapidly empty, and at length the whole street comes to the landlorddemanding that she shall go or threatening to depart themselves.
The lady with “the tongue” of our day was, and as far as I know still may be, known to the law as a common scold, and according to Chief Justice Holt was punishable by ducking. Mrs. Foxby, of Maidstone, was, if I remember, the last lady who was indicted at common law for this offence and sentenced to be ducked. She moved, in Trinity Term, 1703, in arrest of judgment because they had called her in the indictment “calumniatrix” and not “rixatrix” and insisted on her motion, although Chief Justice Holt in kindly warning reminded her that ducking in Trinity Term was pleasanter than ducking in Michaelmas. As the Court pointed out, mere scolding was not the offence, it was the constant repetition that was the nuisance. In the result, after a year’s litigation the flaw in the indictment saved the Maidstone lady a ducking in the Medway.
But though the common scold and the ducking stool no longer figure in the quarter sessions calendar—though it would rest with the Court of Criminal Appeal to decide if they are yet entirely obsolete—the woman with a tongue, the “rixatrix,” or lady brawler is undoubtedly still existent and has to be dealt with by the landlord of small property by County Court eviction.
What is called a possession summons is taken out, and in the hearing of it the lady always appears and protests vigorously against the treatment meted out to her, arguing that the street is in a conspiracy against her, and that she is the one quiet peacefulwoman in the neighbourhood. Any doubt as to the correctness of the judicial decision in making an eviction order is solved as soon as the order is made, when, self-restraint being no longer necessary, the full force of “the tongue” is turned upon the landlord, the judge who is in league with him, and the two stalwart members of the force who with some difficulty show the lady the door. Next to dry rot and vermin, a tenant with “a tongue” is the greatest enemy of the landlord of mean streets.
But what has long been recognised about the status of landlord and tenant, is that under present economic circumstances it is impossible for a wage-earner to obtain at the expenditure of a reasonable proportion of his income proper housing for himself and his wife and children. The duty of the State to the poor in this matter is gradually dawning on people’s minds, they are waking up to the fact that it cannot be done solely by individual effort, and on this subject the law, I am glad to report, is beginning to make serious efforts to set its houses in order.
At present legislation has taken upon itself three objects: (1) The clearing of slum areas and rebuilding new dwellings, with powers of compulsory purchase granted to local bodies. (2) The granting to corporations and councils power to close insanitary houses, and to make their owners repair them. (3) The permission to local authorities to build houses for the working classes where there is an insufficiency.
We are a slow moving race. We generally do our legislative reforms by a succession of statutes vigorously fought over and hacked about by gayparty spirits whose nearest idea of patriotism is to queer the other fellow’s pitch and spoil his budding statute by crimping amendments that he knows will make it unworkable. We have only gone a little way with the Housing business as yet, and if the next statute on the matter could be put in the hands of a small committee of both parties to draft and bring before the House, perhaps we should get somewhat nearer finality.
It is rather melancholy reading to pick up the latest pamphlet of the bookstall on the Housing Question and find much of the writer’s ingenuity wasted in trying to prove that his party, and his only, has in the past made any effort to better the housing of the people, and that in the future there is only one honest capable scheme which is worthy of consideration. There is not much real help in these essays. Their burden is always the same. Recollect at the Election time—“Short’s very well as far as he goes, but the real friend is Codlin—not Short.”
The truth is that neither party has done very much. The history of the matter is much as follows: Writers of all parties and creeds in the Early Victorian days wrote eloquently of the slum dwellings of our great cities. Some of deeper insight than the rest saw that all was not well, even with the rose-covered cottage of the country-side. It is only within our own lifetime that we have begun to learn that it is morally and economically wicked for a nation to own slums. This truth has not been taught us by the priests and politicians of our time, but by our men of letters.
Dickens knew all about it and prophesied in despair that we should have to wait for five hundred years for reform. You remember Tom-all-Alone’s where Jo lives: “It is a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced, by some bold vagrants who, after establishing their own possessions took to letting them out in lodgings. Now these tumbling tenements contain by night a swarm of misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—though born expressly to do it.”
Maybe you could not find to-day an exact replica of Tom-all-Alone’s; certainly we have swept away acres of them, but it is still worth while to read and remember such descriptions, if only to remind ourselves what the poor have to suffer if the law remains powerless and inert in the compulsory provision of decent housing. People grumble at State interference, but they forget what made it necessary. Rampant individualism led to housing workmen in the tailor’s shop, described by Alton Locke “a low lean-to room, stifling me with thecombined odours of human breath and perspirations, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of threads, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and smoke.”
When we are wondering how far it is our right and duty to interfere between a man and his house property or whether it is incumbent upon the nation to take upon itself the burden of housing its people, it is useful to look on these pictures of England in the glorious days of Queen Victoria and Albert the Great and Good. The problems were there then, but it was not the statesmen who saw them and urged their solution.
Nor was it only sentimental Radicals who painted in lurid colours the horrible houses of the people. D’Israeli, in “Sybil,” draws an eloquent picture of the narrow lanes of the rural town of Marney, which might be any country town of the South of England—the rubble cottages with gaping chinks admitting every blast, with rotten timbers, yawning thatch letting in the wind and wet, and open drains full of decomposing animal and vegetable refuse, spreading out here and there with stagnant pools—these things were common-places in the homes of rural England in 1845.
“These wretched tenements,” writes D’Israeli, “seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age or sex or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of child-birth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilisation, surrounded by three generations, whose inevitable presence is more painful than her sufferings in that hour of travail; while the father of her coming child, in another corner of the sordid chamber, lies stricken by that typhus which his contaminating dwelling has breathed into his veins, and for whose next prey is perhaps destined his new-born child. These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather or admit the sun or supply the means of ventilation, the humid or putrid roof of thatch exhaling malaria like all other decaying vegetable matter. The dwelling rooms were neither boarded nor paved; and whether it were that some were situate in low and damp places, occasionally flooded by the river and usually much below the level of the road, or that the springs, as was often the case, would burst through the mud floor, the ground was at no time better than so much clay, while sometimes you might see little channels cut from the centre under the doorways to carry off the water, and the door itself removed from its hinges, a resting place for infancy in its deluged home. These hovels were, in many instances, notprovided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung heap on which every kind of filth was accumulated for the purpose of being disposed of for manure, so that when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it with the breeze of summer, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dung-hills.”
Science, medicine, philanthropy, sanitary engineering and enlightened local government have done something to remove many of the horrible things D’Israeli describes, but one cannot say that the law has co-operated with much vigour in this beneficent crusade. Without law and compulsion the work will never be done as thoroughly as is necessary throughout the length and breadth of the land.
The eloquent outcry, from writers of all creeds and parties, demanding better houses for the people at length made itself heard within the walls of Westminster. But it was not until 1868 that the Torrens Act was passed, the first attempt of the Legislature to deal with slum property. This was followed by the Artisans Dwelling Act of 1875, which enabled local authorities to compulsorily purchase slum areas and re-build sanitary dwellings. In Birmingham, where Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was mayor, magnificent use was made of these powers to the great present benefit of the city. In Liverpool, Manchester, and other towns something was done, but as the business depended in the main on local initiative, and the spending of money, much more remained undone.
A few small measures were passed, but they did not lead to any great practical work being put in hand, and again it was the man of letters who wakened the national conscience. I remember well in the eighties the appearance of “How the Poor Live” by George R. Sims and the interest and sympathy it aroused. There is no exaggeration in the book, but merely a graphic record of fact, and it proves with melancholy certainty the small progress that had been made since the days of Dickens, Kingsley and D’Israeli.
It was with a great chorus of self congratulation and the loud braying of journalistic trumpets that on March 4th, 1884, a Royal Commission was announced to inquire into the Housing of the Working Classes. It is almost forgotten to-day, but in its time it aroused great hopes in the breast of social reformers. Sir Charles Dilke was Chairman, the Prince of Wales himself was a working member of the commission, Cardinal Manning, Lord Salisbury, Samuel Morley, Jesse Collings, Henry Broadhurst and other great public men of the day were his colleagues.
The overcrowding, the immorality and disease and waste caused by bad housing, the terrible tax of rent on the incomes of the poor were all rehearsed in painful detail before these great ones of the earth. But when one comes to remedies and recommendations, there is nothing except the most trivial and inadequate propositions that the eminent ones can agree upon.
Their first suggestion is that vestries and districtboards should put in force existing by-laws, though who was to make them do it is not mentioned. Then they think it would be an added decency to the lives of the poor if there were more mortuaries near their homes to take the dead bodies from the already overcrowded rooms—as though the problem they were there to consider was not the housing of the quick, but the housing of the dead.
Building by-laws, sanitary inspection, and workmen’s trains are a few of the Mother Partington Mop remedies that this great Commission had to offer to keep back the sea of troubles that overwhelmed the poor of our great cities in their struggle for decent existence.
One cannot blame the members of the Commission that so little was suggested. It was inevitable when one remembers that nothing at all is possible in the right direction without a great upheaval which is bound to re-act injuriously on some of the greatest vested interests in the country. A meeting of the great ones in whom the interests vest is not likely to bring about immediate reforms.
But at all events here in the pages of the printed evidence are the facts. The horrors painted by D’Israeli, Kingsley, Dickens and George R. Sims are at least patiently collated and indexed for us, and now after thirty years we should do better not to expatiate on the little we have done for betterment, but to acknowledge how much we have left undone, and show our repentance in energetic deeds. No one can recognise more clearly than I do the value of such authoritative evidence of facts and detailsas are collected in the report, but the reading of them only makes one the more impatient at the method of government which can tolerate the continuance of such abuses.
In 1900, little or nothing having been done, it occurred to Lord Salisbury that it was time to have another Commission. But it was not until 1902 that a Select Committee of both Houses was appointed to consider, in Lord Salisbury’s own words, how to get rid of “what is really a scandal to our civilisation—I mean the sufferings which many of the working classes have to undergo in order to obtain even the most moderate, I may say the most pitiable accommodation.”
The problem could not be better stated. The scandal was with us in 1885, it was with us in 1900, and it is with us to-day. At least if we are unwilling or incompetent to solve it let us have done with the constant consideration and further consideration of Royal and Select Commissions which only make the hearts of the poor sick with promises and hopes that can never be fulfilled in our own generation.
One cannot here set out in detail the various Housing Acts that have been passed; there was one in 1900, which apparently led to more insanitary houses being closed than new cottages built. There was another in 1903, with further new provisions and modifications of former schemes, and lastly comes the Housing and Town Planning Act, which deals rigorously with owners of insanitary property. This Act industriously made use of may help to realiseour hopes of the possibility of hygienic pleasances for the poor of future generations.
Here we have a short record of some fifty years of legislative effort—more or less honest—in which each party has sought to promote measures to help the poor who are oppressed, as Lord Salisbury said, by this “scandal to our civilisation,” the want of decent housing. And yet how little has been achieved, how small the results, how disappointing to find the great men who talked in Parliament and sat on Commissions and discussed these matters with so much learning and ability passing away and leaving this problem for us to tackle, and we on our part looking idly on and still wondering what can be done. If our schoolmasters had taught us how to make bricks and build with them instead of how to read books and write more of them, better results perhaps had been already achieved.
There are many acres of houses in England built prior to 1870 that exhibit all the slum traits that have been so eloquently described in literature, and many millions of our fellow citizens live in houses which fall below the minimum standard of sanitation where the decent separation of the sexes is impossible and the general conditions of life are sunless and miserable. The amount of overcrowding in England and Wales is shown graphically enough in the census returns for 1911. Overcrowding from a census point of view means that more than two persons live in a room, counting the kitchen as a room, but not the scullery. “Thus,” as the Editor of the Land Inquiry Report tells us,“if a tenement or cottage consists of two bedrooms and a kitchen, the Census Authorities would only describe it as overcrowded if there were more than six persons living in it, no matter how small the rooms. The Census test of overcrowding is, in fact, quite inadequate to measure the full extent of the evil, and there is great need for the adoption of a more accurate one. Even adopting this standard, however, the Census Authorities find that one-tenth of the total urban population of England and Wales are overcrowded. This means that nearly 3,000,000 persons are overcrowded.”
No one who is constantly meeting the victims of this state of affairs, and discussing with them, as a County Court Judge has to do, their domestic affairs, can fail to be struck with the large amount of infantile mortality and disease, and the prevalence of tuberculosis and the general physical and moral weariness and debility, which may in a great measure be traced to the bad conditions in which the working classes must perforce live because there is nothing better obtainable.
The price paid for such accommodation as there is, is a cruel tax on the working man. For the meanest shelter he has to pay anything up to twenty per cent. of his weekly income. Imagine a man with a thousand a year spending two hundred a year in rent alone. How eloquent would the Official Receiver be did bankruptcy supervene, as it probably would, and what homilies he would preach on the rash and extravagant folly of the bankrupt in spending so large a proportion of his income on a house. Andyet this extravagance is compulsory to a working man, who has to pay out of his wages for a mere roof over his head money that is badly needed for the food and clothing of himself and his family.
I have dwelt on this subject at some length because in most of the chapters of this book my complaint has been that the laws are insufficient to help the poor, because they have in past days been enacted by the rich, and are still being administered by the rich, without knowledge of, and sympathy for, the best interests of the poor. Here the problem is entirely different. Everyone must admit the energy and good faith of all classes and parties and officials, within the rules of the party game, in their endeavour to cope with a condition of things which is an admitted national disgrace, and a scandal to civilisation. The melancholy conclusion, however, stares one in the face. The result of interminable inquiries and committee meetings and palaver is plain unmistakable failure. The fringe of the subject has scarcely been reached, and the state of affairs which the man of letters portrayed to the shame of our grandfathers is likely enough, it would seem, to be “copy” for our grandchildren and their grandchildren to journalise with world without end Amen!
And although it would be impertinent in me to pretend to have a remedy for these evils where all the great ones have failed to bring about reform, yet I cannot help thinking that the reason of the failure is the reason of much of our legislative failure—the dread of vested interests and thepermissive character of the statutes passed. What is the good of asking a town council of builders and landowners and estate agents to put in force laws that will, or at least are expected to, have the effect of diminishing their incomes? Should I, or would you, enforce an Act of Parliament with any joyful energy when we knew that the more thoroughly we did it the more we should be out of pocket? It is asking too much of human nature.
There has been a clear failure in the smaller local governing bodies in putting in force even such legislation as exists for the betterment of the district. The Rivers Pollution Acts are a standing instance of the neglect of duty by local councils. For years nothing was done to put the Acts in force, because the smaller polluters were the mill owners, who were members of the local council, and the biggest polluter of all was the council itself pouring crude sewage into the river to relieve the rates.Parliamentlacked a sense of humour when it expected mill owners and sewage boards to prosecute themselves for river pollution.
Good work in housing will never, I think, be really effectively done until it is left to the initiative of a medical officer of health or a sanitary engineer, with judicial power to order things to be done and force behind him to have them done. The idea that a medical officer of health should be a servant of the casual butchers and bakers of the Town Council is, on the face of it, an absurd one. He should be as permanent and independent as are the stipendiary, the judge, or the coroner, for he requires even morethan common fearlessness to deal roundly with the jerry builders and slum owners who are his aldermen and councillors, and who at present sit on a committee of appeal from his decisions.
As long as these matters are left solely to local bodies the real burden of financial consideration, the lack of personal knowledge of hygiene and sanitation among the members themselves, and the shrinking from enforcing legal hardships on the poor owners of bad property, will alone prevent effective reform. To these natural and honest forces must also be added the weight of vested interests, which deliberately obtain power on local bodies for the purpose of preventing housing reform being put into thorough operation.
Never was there a greater and louder demand by the people for a fair share of the land they live in. The countryman wants his plot and his cottage, and the town dweller a decent house at a reasonable rent. This is the “condition of England question” to-day as it was eighty years ago. Never were there more earnest and sincere people discussing what is to be done and how it is possible to transform slums into decent dwellings by Act of Parliament. We have a willing legislature, a desire to make laws for the benefit of the poor, and after many efforts the result has to be written down as failure and stagnation. It would almost seem as though voluntary effort in this affair had pronounced itself impossible, and it remains undealt with until those who are the real sufferers by the system feel strong enough to put it right.
Carlyle in an eloquent passage cries out in his passionate way: “Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical. Whose landwasthis of Britain? God’s who made it, His and no other’s it was and is. Who of God’s creatures had a right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes, they; till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt, ‘aboriginal savage of Europe,’ as a snarling antiquary names him arrived, pretending to have a better right, and did accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that piece of God’s land; namely, a better might to turn it to use—a might to settle himself there and try what use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession and tilled.”
Interpreting this passage as one written in the true frenzy of prophecy, two things seem to me to take clear shape in the future outlook of the housing question. In the first place, it would seem that it will have to be settled by a Celt, and in the second place it will not be achieved “without pain to the bisons.”
One would have thought that a better plan would be a small business parliamentary committee of all interests with power to enforce their decrees against owners and corporate bodies. Something permanent is necessary, akin to the Imperial Defence Committee, which knows no party politics. Are we not here in the face of a real danger to the nation? Already endeavours have been made to take thismatter out of the common rut of party politics, but these efforts have not been altogether successful, and if the matter is not settled soon there would seem nothing for it but a forcible solution and a merry set-to between the Celt and the bison, in which we may expect the Celt will get the better of the bison but we cannot be sure that the poor will get all they need even from the Celt.
THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES1.The Alehouse.
Whatever you may think about it you cannot travel from Charing Cross to Dijon through the hop-fields of Kent to the vineyards of the Côte-d’Or without admitting that whether the vine be a gift of good or evil it has come to stay. Bacchus is still full of vigour and has as many followers as ever. But the law has nothing to say to Bacchus. The law is after old Silenus. It lures him into a den and makes him drunk and then locks him up, and the holy Willies wag their heads at his shame and collect money for his reformation.
There are two public houses open to the poorer citizens—the Alehouse and the Workhouse. The rich man frequents neither, yet as magistrate or guardian he takes upon himself to lay down the rules by which they shall be run. These fussy, amiable, amateur bosses have conspicuously failed at theirjob. It is not to be wondered at. As an able Manchester business man once said to me of his partner: “He loves sitting on the licensing bench, and thank heaven he does; it keeps him out of the office.” But even if the bosses were capable and intelligent they could not hope to succeed in their work. Public institutions should be governed by the men who make use of them. The rich man’s public-house is so regulated—and what is the result? One may not approve of every detail of cookery or decoration at hotels like the Ritz in London, or the Adelphi and Midland in Liverpool and Manchester, but the average middle-class man will find in them such reasonable standard of comfort as he desires. There is, at all events, space and light and air, cleanliness, and some luxury. On proper occasions and in fit places there is music, dancing, and billiards, and you may play a game of bridge with your friends when you wish, even for threepence a hundred, in a private room. Moreover, there is always food of good quality obtainable at varied prices, and you need not take your drink standing at a counter, though you can if you wish to when there is an American bar.
Why may not the working man have similar entertainment at the Pig and Whistle? A complete answer to that question would necessitate a study of the position of artificers and labourers in the middle ages and a short history of the ideals of the well-to-do puritans.
The rich have had two objects in view in their legislation about the working-man’s public house.A certain section of the rich—the brewers—have aimed at a monopoly of the right to sell him ale, and nothing else, at the biggest possible profit to themselves. A second section opposing the first—the teetotal magistracy—have sought to make the public house as dreary and miserable a place as possible in order to punish the wicked man who wants to drink ale. Between the brewer and the puritan the respectable working man with a normal thirst has been jockeyed out of his freedom. Swilling and tippling in alehouses and private clubs has been encouraged; the reasonable use of ale—which Mr. Belloc rightly asserts to be the finest beverage in the world—has been crabbed and discouraged. Except an opium den—of which I have only hearsay knowledge—there is probably nothing more comfortless and degrading than the lower-class alehouse of our towns and cities.
Even in the remote days of Plato it was recognised—at all events by philosophers—that there was such a thing as thirst. “No one desiresdrinksimply, but good drink, nor food simply, but good food; because, since all desire good things, if thirst is a desire, it must be a desire of something good.” Further on in the discussion, Socrates addresses Ademantus thus: “Then for any particular kind of drink there is a particular kind of thirst; but thirst in the abstract is neither for much drink, nor for little, neither for good drink nor for bad, nor, in one word for any kind of drink, but simply and absolutely thirst for drink is it not?”
“Most decidedly so,” replies Ademantus—whonever on any occasion stood up to Socrates and contradicted him. “Most decidedly so.”
“Then the soul of a thirsty man,” continues Socrates, “in so far as he is thirsty has no other wish than to drink; but this it desires and towards this it is impelled.”
“Clearly so.”
If the licensing bench, and especially the teetotal portion of it, could once arrive as far in their studies of the subject as Socrates had done, and could comprehend the zoological fact that man was a mammal with a thirst, they would be on the road to enlightenment, temperance, and reform.
Of course Socrates knew all that the puritans know and a lot more about the rational satisfaction of love and hunger and thirst and the irrational and concupiscent desires that are attached to all natural appetites, but in dealing with the law of licensing in reference to the poor these considerations are not really important. What is wanted is equality. Grant to the poor the same reasonable facilities of enjoyment that you grant to the rich, and leave it to public opinion to see that they are not abused.
It is a grave disaster that the granting and regulation of licenses should have fallen into the hands it has. Mr. Balfour’s observation “that among all the social evils which meet us in every walk of life, every sphere of activity, the greatest of all evils is the evil of intemperance” is useful as a peroration to any platform speech on the subject, but only makes the judicious grieve that with the opportunity to do exactly as he liked and the ability to draftuseful legislation, Mr. Balfour did nothing whatever to improve matters and diminish the evil of which he was so sensible.
Section 4 of his Act does indeed enable the magistrates to grant new licenses and to make their own conditions as to the payments to be made by the licensee, the tenure of the license, and any other matters “as they think proper in the interests of the public.” Under this section if there were a licensing bench containing a working majority of friends of the people, men who had no social or political interest whatever either in breweries or teetotallers, it would seem that almost any experiment in model public houses could be made under any regulations that the bench chose to impose on the licensee. Mr. Balfour was perfectly right in telling us that “love of temperance is the polite name for hatred of the publican”; but what is the right name for love of the brewer? The fact is that with these two warring political factions in the field the ideal public house is not for this generation. No use will ever be made of Section 4 under present conditions, because whoever applied for a license, and however noble and beautiful the licensed premises were to be, however ideal the provision of food, entertainment and drink, and whatever the guarantees of good management, the combined opposition of the puritans and the brewers would always strive to defeat or destroy any effort to give the poorer classes pure beer in pure surroundings.
The first step you have to take is to convince the unenlightened puritan that the Alehouse is, or oughtto be, as worthy a public house as the church or the school. This might be done by means of thoughtfully prepared text books of English literature. There is no great English book from the Bible downwards that has not incidental good and holy things to tell you of “The Inn.” What an appetising volume could be written of the inns and innkeepers of Charles Dickens. How he revelled in their outward appearance and the inward soul of welcome which he found there. How he rejoiced in his sane English way over “The Maypole,” “with its overhanging stories, drowsy little panes of glass and front bulging out and projecting over the pathway,” and honest John Willet, the burly, large-headed man with a fat face, intended by providence and nature for licensed victualling. Could we have met Mrs. Lupin anywhere else than beneath the sign of that “certain Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village alehouse door”? Could Mark Tapley have acquired his saintly outlook on life anywhere but at “The Blue Dragon,” and are we not full of joy to find him returning there to live happily ever afterwards under the “wery new, conwivial, and expressive” sign of “The Jolly Tapley”? How pleasant it is to assist Crummles and Nicholas over their bowl of punch and the beefsteak-pudding in the inn on the Portsmouth Road. Pickwick is a cyclopædia of inns, each with its own human character, good, bad and indifferent. Who has not stayed at a “Peacock” with a “mantelshelf ornamented with a wooden inkstand, containing one stump of a pen and half a wafer: a road book anddirectory: a county history minus the cover: and the mortal remains of a trout in a glass coffin”?
One could run on in pleasant remembrances of these beautiful and delightful places by the hour, but one imagines that even the most hardened political teetotaller must really know all about them, and perhaps in his dreams strolls into “The Marquis of Granby” and sips his glass of reeking hot pine-apple rum and water with a slice of lemon in it, and awakens to the horrible imagination that his astral body has wandered instinctively into a manifestation of his master and leader, the incomparable Stiggins.
One very noticeable matter about any old-world book in which inns are faithfully pictured is that in former days there was a real race of English innkeepers, independent licensed victuallers, not mere brewers’ managers. There are still a few remaining with us who keep up the old traditions, but the political forces of brewers and teetotallers have squeezed this excellent race of public servants almost wholly out of existence. You remember the Six-Jolly-Fellowship-Porters whose bar was “a bar to soften the human breast” with its “corpulent little casks and cordial bottles radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches and lemons in nets and biscuits in baskets, and polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer.” How could there have been such an ideal haven for the weary porters but for the sole proprietor and manager, Miss Abbey Potterson, whose dignity and firmness were a tradition of the riverside?
And then the dressing down she gave Rogue Riderhood.
“But you know, Miss Potterson,” this was suggested very meekly though, “if I behave myself you can’t help serving me, miss.”
“Can’t I!” said Abbey with infinite expression.
“No, Miss Potterson; because you see the law——”
“I am the law here, my man,” returned Miss Abbey, “and I’ll soon convince you of that if you doubt it at all.”
“I never said I did doubt it at all, Miss Abbey.”
“So much the better for you.”
And how much better not only for Rogue Riderhood, but for all of us, if we could once again make licensed victualling a great and respectable trade, and once again have a race of people managing businesses that they could really take a pride in.
The death of the old Boniface who owned his house and bought his beer in the open market was brought about by the amalgamation of the smaller breweries in the country, and the purchase of the bulk of the licensed houses by the big breweries. The teetotallers assisted this natural evolution by harassing individual owners with trumpery prosecutions, opposing alterations and transfers at licensing sessions, and surrounding the commercial life of an individual licensee with persecution and annoyance and continued threats of impending ruin. One man could not fight the great moneyed forces of the puritans, and the licensed holder was glad to get out of an impossible trade by selling his interest to thebrewers. Most of the licensed houses in the country now belong in everything but name to the big brewery companies. Their political friends have given them a vested interest in their licenses, and the teetotallers having spent large sums of money and wasted much energy in manœuvring their opponents into this excellent position, now sit sulkily at the gates of it, and as they cannot do any effective good themselves, take earnest pleasure in preventing any enlightened brewer from making the conditions under which he sells his drink better and healthier for the community.
The result is that the poor man suffers. In the whole of this long unworthy struggle between the political teetotaller and the brewer, the higher interests of the poor and the real desires of the working classes are scarcely ever mentioned—still less considered. When he is in sufficient numbers, and is well enough off to do so, the poor man starts a club like his betters, and no doubt these are valuable institutions, but the club at the best does little for the wives and children, and is apt, unless the public opinion of it is sound, to lead a man astray owing to its very privacy. The puritan ideal is to drive the drinker into dark secret places, and as far as possible make his surroundings uncomfortable and degrading. The policy of the future is going to be to encourage the authorities—and, if necessary, get new and more up-to-date authorities—to replace the old dark, dirty puritan pub with a bright and enchanting reformed inn, fit for all classes of folk, with music, entertainment, and all manner of reasonable refreshment.Nothing can be done until we recognise frankly that for years we have been moving along a false track towards a mirage castle in the air, and that if anything useful is to be achieved by administration or legislation we must turn our backs on the past and start along a new road.
Some few facts seem beyond dispute. The mere cutting down of licenses has in itself no demonstrable effect on the evil of the drink habit. The manners and habits of all classes of people are tending to temperance and sobriety, but the consumption of exciseable articles is increasing—last year there was an increase of £5,128,000 over the figures of 1912.
What, then, is to be done? I think if we really want to do good in the matter and can approach it without a desire to make dividends out of brewery shares, or make alliances with teetotallers for political ends, we shall have to look to some extent to foreign examples for guidance in our difficulties.
All of us who have had leisure and money to see something of foreign countries know that the squalid ideal of the brewer and the puritan is not the only possible solution of such social difficulty as there is in providing reasonable alehouses. The British public-house is a national disgrace thrust by the rich on the poor by means of law. The working man has no chance of amending things, as he has no say in electing the bosses. Labour leaders short-sightedly favour the puritans’ views. Certainly, our public-houses being what they are, it is a choice of evils to keep out of them.
But why should public-houses be what they are? I well remember at Mayence entering a beautiful public hall—it was a rainy night, or the entertainment would have been out of doors—where there was a fine string band playing excellent music. Men, women, and children sat at tables and had ham and bread and cake and beer and coffee, and those who wished to do so smoked. There was no swilling at counters, there was no forced teetotalism, there was no drunkenness; merely domestic liberty for rational enjoyment.
Why cannot there be sufficient free trade in the beer business of this country to allow an individual or, if you prefer it, an enlightened municipality—where such exists—to copy the sane entertainments of our German neighbours? A working man and his wife and children spend their evening listening to the band in a German beer-garden with as little sense of impropriety as Lord and Lady De Vere and the Hon. Gladys De Vere take their lunch at the Ritz, or Alderman and Mrs. Snooks lunch in the French restaurant at the Midland.
But in England these domestic felicities are for the rich alone. The brewers and puritans have given the poor man a mean tippling-house to booze in, and deny him anything better. His wife is looked upon as degraded if she joins him at the only place where he can spend his leisure, and the rich lawgivers put the true stamp on their own invention by enacting that it is an unfit place for little children to enter.
The fact is that the public house should be builtin the interests of the public. There seems no great decrease in the desire to drink good ale. It is a national taste, and, if the ale be good, it is probably at least as healthy, or healthier, than drinking tea as tea is brewed in cottage homes. But in the name of liberty and equality, surely if a man wants to drink ale in moderation he should be encouraged to do so in bright, pleasant surroundings, where he can spend his evenings at a moderate cost with his wife and children and meet his friends. He should be allowed to open such a place himself if the municipality will not do it for him, and the more civilised brewers should be assisted and encouraged by the licensing authorities to build big, spacious public houses, where the poor man could obtain similar entertainment to that provided for his wealthier brother.
There is something almost shameless in the way in which the law of licensing is stretched to the uttermost for the rich and drawn to the narrowmost for the poor. One picks up a paper with an account of the latest midnight ball—the gayest event of the season—all in the interests of charity, of course. What has become of that closing time which, if overstepped by the poor, means police court for the criminals and loss of license to the innkeeper? It has been extended, no doubt, by a complacent magistrate, and you can sit down to supper at midnight, and all night long you can refresh yourself at American bars presided over by beautiful ladies of the chorus. One gathers there will be no closing time at all, as breakfasts will beserved from three o’clock. In the intervals of the dancing there are to be famous music-hall turns. At some of these fashionable dances valuable prizes are given, at others these fall to lucky ones by some form of lot—not lottery, of course, for that would be against the law, and these entertainments are arranged by eminent leaders of society who are always within the law—well within it.
It would be ill mannered to endeavour to stop so much innocent enjoyment of a class that has so little real pleasure by enforcing the licensing and other laws to interfere with their amusements. On the contrary, we should seek to use their example and better our own licensing circumstances by an appeal to their precedent. If it is good for leaders of society to sing and dance and sup after hours in their public houses, why should not the rest of society be allowed to follow their example and have their own beanfeasts in ample public houses undisturbed by the law? Of course there must be a charity! Give me an extension of license in the Old Kent Road and I will provide plenty of charities and plenty of lads and lasses ready to sing Mr. Adrian Ross’s refrain:
Care has gone to sleep till morning,Night’s the noon of joy.
For the young people of the poor are just as fond of a spree as those of the rich, and quite as ready to be charitable to the extent of their means after the same fashion.
There is an excellent letter of Charles Kingsley’s written to the “Christian Socialist” some sixtyyears ago that might well be circulated among licensing benches by the Home Office—though I believe it is considered officially to be bad economy to address printed common sense to the unpaid magistracy. Naturally, autocrats resent or scoff at advice that has no sanction behind it. The teetotal attitude of mind and the quarrels it aroused very properly disgusted Kingsley. He took no pleasure in hearing the water drinkers calling the beer drinkers “flabby, pot-bellied, muddle-headed, disgusting old brutes,” and the beer drinkers retorting on the water drinkers that they were “conceited puritans and manichees and ascetics.” He saw that the quarrel would not do any good to the cause of temperance, and in his honest enthusiasm blurted out the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his teetotal friends, like the good old Christian warrior that he was.
“On my honour,” he writes, “unless the teetotallers show a more humble, gentle and tolerant spirit than is common among them I shall advise beer drinkers like myself and Mr. Hughes (Tom Brown of the Schooldays) either to flee the country, or if their cloth allows them, which mine does not, prove by self-defence that a man can value his beer, and thank God for it with a good conscience, as tens of thousands do daily and yet feel as tight about the loin and as wiry in the arm as any teetotaller in England. Honestly, I am jesting in earnest. I regard this teetotal movement with extreme dread. I deeply sympathise with the horror of our English drunkenness that produced it.I honour every teetotaller as I honour every man who proves by his action that he possesses high principle and manful self-restraint.... That a man should be a teetotaller rather than a drunkard needs no proof. Also that a man should go about in a sack rather than be a fop and waste time and money on dress. But I think temperance in beer, like temperance in clothes, is at once a more rational and a higher virtue either than sackcloth or water.”
This was true doctrine then and is true doctrine to-day, and the sad fact that it fell on deaf ears and is still but half understood is the reason of our backwardness in licensing reform and the presence of the degrading public house which the law cherishes and protects.
Only the other day in a country town, on the application for a license, the police superintendent objected to the house on the ground of the small bar accommodation. His Grace the Duke, who happened to be in the chair, wanted to know if the proprietor of the house would prepare a plan for enlarging the bar accommodation. What could the proprietor do? The police wanted to herd the drinkers into a bar so that they could pop their heads in and see them all at once without any trouble, the bench wanted to do what the police wanted them to do. The interests of the poor, the cause of temperance, the betterment of the social life of the people were as irrelevant to the case as the flowers that bloom in the spring.
At many a licensing session, too, you will listen to solemn warnings by the superintendent of policeagainst the public being allowed to amuse themselves with penny-in-the-slot machines or gramophones or parlour quoits or the like. Amusement is regarded with a natural horror by the puritan, and the friends of the brewer see in it a dangerous alternative to the duty of the working man to drink. One police authority threatened the license holders “that if they continued to allow these machines to be used in their licensed premises they did so at the risk of prosecution for allowing gaming.” The gaming laws of England with their wholesale permission of gambling in one place and their retail persecution of gambling in another place, and their incapacity to know when a place is not a place or how otherwise, are a public laughing stock, but it is a grievous thing that they should be dragged out to drive a little harmless amusement out of the dingy tavern which is the only public institution the poor man has for rest and recreation.
As a matter of fact, these machines, if they are used for gambling, are generally used to see who shall pay for drinks. In some bars in foreign countries a dice-box is always handy for this purpose. Three or four friends come in and throw, the loser pays for drinks, and all are satisfied, and having had their drink they go. I am not upholding the custom as ideal, but I see little harm in it. In England, if three or four enter a public house, the etiquette in many places is for one to stand drinks, and for the rest in turn to offer to stand another round—an offer seldom refused—and for the rounds to continue until each has stood his corner. I wouldnot go so far as to insist on a compulsory dice-box in every bar, but I fancy on the whole that it is an agent of temperance.
Every one who has given any thought to temperance as opposed to teetotalism, is agreed that what is wanted is the gradual elimination of bars and counters and the substitution of chairs and tables and big open rooms. In these must be provided tea, coffee, and all the usual lighter refreshments that you find in the better-class restaurants and hotels. In a big West End hotel you find every afternoon that the lounge is laid out for afternoon tea. I do not see why a working man and his wife should not have their tea in a lounge in their public house. I cannot understand why, if two friends after a day in the workshop want to have a friendly chat, they cannot find an institution where one can have his cup of tea and a muffin, and the other his glass of ale and a sandwich, and both sit at one table in a spacious room with comfortable surroundings, and if they do not heartily dislike it a gramophone to play tunes to them. That is impossible of attainment as the law now stands. If a millionaire was to offer to build in Manchester a dozen working-men’s cafés on the continental plan where any decent citizen could be pleased to take his wife and children, as our French and German neighbours do, the brewers, the teetotallers, the police, the licensing magistrates and the law would see that it was not permitted.
And yet we know by experiment that in proper surroundings, reasonable facilities for refreshmentdo not lead to drunkenness. In the Manchester Exhibition of 1887, it being a wonderfully fine summer, and licenses having been freely given for the occasion, there was an opportunity of testing whether under proper conditions opportunity led to excess. I never heard that it did. In the Franco-British Exhibition where reasonable facilities of refreshment were also given, it is said—and I have no doubt truly said—that though eight or nine million visitors passed through the turnstiles, yet there was not a single case of drunkenness.
The problem is really a simple one, if we could only get administrators and legislators, but especially the former, to look at it in the interest of the man in the street. To the big brewery company beer is an effluent, and the public house is the conduit pipe through which they pour it into the public stomach. They have obviously no interest in ideal public houses—and why should they? They are business men on business bent. The teetotallers, on the other hand, regard the drinking of beer as a sin, and any public house as the house of the Devil. Why should they help the Devil to make his house sweet and attractive, and make the path easier for the poor sinner who thirsts after beer? At present the average licensing bench consists of “half and half”—to use a trade term—of these elements. If there happen to be a few cranks on the bench who share the feather-headed notions set down in this chapter, they can always be out-voted by a combination of brewer and teetotaller. And for my part I think we shall stick to our glorious institution of the“tied-house” just as long as the working man intends to allow us and no longer.
When reformed public houses are taken up by the men who use the public house, and when labour demands something better, the demand will be met. For the teetotaller is nothing if not political, and when he sees where the votes are, and not before, he will begin to see the error of his ways.
Meanwhile it will do him no harm to study the statistics such as they are, and discover that the number of licenses in a district has nothing to do with the amount of drunkenness therein, and to look back on the past history of the public house and recognise that he has for many years been the friend and ally of the undesirable brewer. The good citizen’s policy should be the provision of pure ale in wholesome surroundings, thereby freeing the working class from the tyranny of the public house. To the teetotallers who hinder such a policy I can only repeat Charles Kingsley’s message: “And I solemnly warn those who try to prevent it that they are, with whatsoever good intentions, simply doing the Devil’s work.”
THE TWO PUBLIC HOUSES2.The Workhouse.